Shopping checkout (e.g., retail supermarket, etc.) is a process by which most everyone is familiar. Typical checkout involves a shopper navigating about a store collecting items/items for purchase. Often the shopper will utilize a shopping receptacle such as a shopping cart and/or shopping basket. Upon completion of gathering the desired items, the shopper will proceed to a checkout station for checkout (e.g., bagging and payment). In recent years, many stores have become equipped with self-checkout stations whereby a shopper will scan and bag the items his/herself, and then make payment via the self-checkout station.
A recent trend has been to allow the shopper to perform some of these functions as he/she navigates about the store. Unfortunately, none of the existing approaches provides a way to prevent device (e.g., scanner error) and/or theft (e.g., switching barcodes, not scanning items placed in the cart, etc.). Moreover, many of the existing approaches require expensive retrofitting of shopping receptacles, which themselves provide an increased security risk. In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for an approach that solves at least one of the deficiencies in the existing art.
It is desirable, when shoppers in supermarkets and other large retail stores self-check out, that the process be both as rapid as possible, to make the customer happy, and as secure as possible, to make the store happy. The more this process can be both instantaneous and 100% secure, the better. No existing process achieves these desired goals simultaneously. Self-checkout typically includes three separate functions that today are mostly lumped together at a single point of sale (POS) station: (1) enumerating each item to be purchased, and determining its price (typically, by presenting it to a bar code scanner); (2) verifying that each item is what it was claimed to be; and, (3) paying for all the items. With the advent of smart shopping carts that are already coming into service and similar devices, step 1 is being done at the time of item-pickup in the store aisles, and step 3 follows immediately, if the bill is charged against a credit card. This leaves step 2 as an area of potential bottleneck and security risk.